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B 3317 
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Thoughts from Nietzsche 



BY 



REV. ROBERT S. WRING 

Minister of 



The First Unitarian Church 



MILWAUKEE. 



/. The §uperman. 

II. The Weakness of Pity. 

HI. Christianity as a Denial of Life. 



Nietzsche is medicine, not food. 
A tonic need not taste good to do good. 



THREE SUNDAY MORNING ADDRESSES PRINTED 

FOR FREE DISTRIBUTION BY MEMBERS OF 

THE MILWAUKEE UNITARIAN CHURCH. 



UNITARIANISM 

A RELIGION THA T THINKS IN 
TERMS OF MODERN LIFE. 



Practical Religion is summed up in Love to God 
and Love to Man. No church needs a longer 
creed than this. 

The Old Bible contains helpful moral and religious 
ideals. It also contains much outgrown reli- 
gion, poor history, and worse science. We 
read only the best parts in church and let the 
rest alone. 

Modern Literature and other world religions also 
contain good news. So we also read from them 
on Sunday. 

Jesus, the world's greatest religious teacher, had 
many ideas suited only to his own age. We 
do not worry trying to explain this, but just 
forget it. He also had ideals helpful for all 
time; these alone we include in our modern 
faith. 

Progress is as much needed in religion as in 
science. Freedom is necessary to progress. 
He who seeks a hitching-post will not feel at 
home in our free church. 

The God of Science, the universal Law, Order, 
Energy, and the God of Religion, the universal 
Beauty, Goodness, Love, is One God. 






THE SUPERMAN. 



There is nothing very interesting about the life 
of Nietzsche except his writings. Born in Germany 
in 1 844, he believed that his family came from 
Poldfand. Since he had little respect for either Ger- 
man militarism or German culture, he always pre- 
ferred to be called a Pole. His father was a country 
clergyman but transmitted to his son none of his 
own respectful attitude toward religion. Nietzsche, 
when young, was said to have been "the perfection 
of a well mannered boy, and never did anything 
naughty". Perhaps he was saving his strength in 
order to throw stones later in life at everything with 
which he disagreed. As a model boy he gained a 
fellowship which enabled him to spend six years in 
an exclusive preparatory school where he speciali- 
zed in languages. At the university he devoted him- 
self to classical studies, and at twenty-four became 
a professor of philology at Basel, in Switzerland, 
where he taught for ten years with success. 1 hen 
he gave up his professorship and devoted himself 
to critical writing. His mind died in 1 889, but his 
body continued to live until 1 900. 

An admirer of Nietzsche calls him "a poet- 
philosopher, a lover of mankind, a prophet of a 
Christ that is to be". Such terms do not seem 
accurate. They imply a genial spirit, a sym- 
pathy with life, a desire to help all men. These 
qualities are not prominent in Nietzsche's books. 
Nietzsche is more like strong medicine than like 
pleasant food. His teachings provide a tonic for 
occasional use rather than every-day spiritual 
nourishment. Like many old-fashioned tonics they 
often leave a bitter taste in the mouth. There 



seems, however, to be this difference; while the 
old-fashioned tonic had printed on the bottle, 
"Shake before Taking* \ in the case of Nietzsche 
you first take, and then you shake. Sometimes 
you shake with indignation that such radical 
thoughts should ever get into print. At other 
times you shake with fear lest long cherished be- 
liefs should be overthrown. 

Take the startling titles of some of Nietzsche's 
books. "Beyond Good and Evil"; how that 
shakes the comfortable opinion that ethical ques- 
tions have all been settled. Take "The Anti- 
Christ"; how that shakes those orthodox be- 
lievers who blindly cling to the dogmatic, priest- 
ly, ritualistic type of Christianity. Or consider 
some of his striking sentences. "It is only among 
decadents that pity is called a virtue"; how this 
irritates those inefficient persons to whom life is 
a slush of sentimentalism, and makes them weep 
more unavailing tears than ever. Or there is his 
notorious remark about war; You say, it is a 
good cause that justifies a war; I say it is a good 
war that justifies every cause". We can see the 
professional pacifist grow red in the face, reach 
angrily for the nearest weapon, and rush into the 
fight. 

Extremely irritating sentences are not what we 
expect from a "poet-philosopher"; but they are 
not inappropriate in a strong tonic. If the tonic 
be of the fraudulent and patent medicine type, 
then the stimulant is bad and ought to be con- 
demned. But if the tonic be wisely prepared, 
and the shock contains a due percentage of 
truth, then a dose may be good for us jail, espe- 
cially when we are suffering from mental or mo- 
ral indolence. 



— 5 — 

Now Nietzsche holds that all society is suffer- 
ing from an attack of this tired feeling. Men are 
made inefficient by a kind of universal spring- 
fever, a sort of mental and moral hook-worm 
disease. The result is the half-hearted type of 
life Ibsen ridiculed, when in his poem, "Brand", 
he wrote: 

"Try every man in heart and soul, 

You'll find he has no virtue whole, 

But just a little grain of each. 

A little pious in the pew, 

A little grave, — his father's way, — 

A little free in promise making, «; 

And then, when vows in liquor willed, 

Must be in mortal stress fullfilled, 

A little fine in promise breaking. 

Yet, as I say, all fragments still, 

His faults, his merits, fragments all, 

Partial in good, partial in ill, 

Partial in great things, and in small; — 

And here's the grief, that, worse or best, , 

Each fragment of him wrecks the rest." 

In a world of ambition and courage men 
ought to help one another to rise above the 
common-place level, but this is the last thing 
they ever do. As Emerson wrote: "Society 
everywhere is in conspiracy against the mjanhood 
of every one of its members. Self-reliance is its 
aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but 
names and customs". Nietzsche enters into par- 
ticulars and gives a list of the things that dis- 
courage the search for realities. There is Philos- 
ophy, of the self-satisfied type. If a man's 
thought be tired of the contradictions of life, if 
he be too weary to think his way farther along 



— 6 — 

the path towards truth, then some so-called final 
system of philosophy comes along. It tells him 
that all truth has been discovered and asks him 
to enroll himself as a blind follower of Plato, or 
Kant, or Hegel. There is Democracy, as Nietz- 
sche understands, or misunderstands it. If a man 
be weary trying to reach social perfection, if the 
struggle for new and higher types of social life 
be too much for him, democracy bids him rest. 
It declares that life on "Main Street" is good 
enough, that the standard of the crowd is suffi- 
cient, that the hoarse mutterings of the drab un- 
educated mass is the voice of God, and that the 
struggle for the unusual may cease. There is 
Socialism. If a man tire trying to earn a living, 
if courage fail him in business competition, if he 
have not the heart to strive for leadership and 
efficiency in industry, he is told to average pro- 
perty and wages, to adjust his work to the low- 
est level, and to slow down the wheels of prog- 
ress. 

There is Morality, that lower form of moral- 
ity which identifies itself with custom, and is 
always praising the "good old days". If a man 
become discouraged about progress and reform, 
this morality takes advantage of his weakness. 
It says to him, What is the use of change, stick 
to the old ways, follow the old crowd and you 
cannot go wrong. There is Religion, of thjat 
enervating type that Nietzsche calls a "crime 
against life". It teaches that it is impossible for 
man to be good for much in this evil world. He 
must look to Heaven for salvation. He need not 
take the trouble to be heroic, for he can expect 
some supernatural being to do the work for him, 
to make up all his deficiences, and to carry his 



— 7 — 

sins. There is Art, which also may be employed 
as a narcotic. If a man just feels wrong, he uses 
a few sweet sounds, or bits of bright colors to 
hypnotize himself, to call his attention away from 
stern realities. If we recite an ancient creed in 
church the spoken words may seem to contradict 
modern experience and knowledge. But when 
we hear a great choir sing the creed, the sensuous, 
sound of many voices puts a false authority into 
the words, and our feelings assent to doctrines 
which the mind denies. Thus art may be used 
to draw a curtain between m&n and truth. 

It is this half-hearted kind of world, half- 
hearted in work and thought and ideals, which 
meets us in Nietzsche's most celebrated book, 
"Thus Spake Zarathustra*'. For ten years Zara- 
thustra, the prophet of the Superman, has lived 
alone on a mountain. One morning he gets up 
early and announces to his only neighbor, the 
sun, that he has accumulated so much wisdom 
that it rather tires him, a remark characteristic 
of both the Superman and Nietzsche. So he hias 
determined to go down into the valley and share 
his overflowing knowledge with men. When he 
reaches the market place he finds the people 
gathered together waiting to see two dancers per- 
form on a tight-rope." He seizes the opportunity 
to make a speech. Like every radical reformer 
he attacks them for being hopelessly content 
with their present life. "It is not your sins, it is 
your self-satisfaction that cries to heaven.** You 
laugh at the apes from which you sprang, but the 
future man will laugh just as much at you. Man 
is not a goal, as you think, but something to be 
surpassed. You ought to recognize that you are 
a rope stretched between the animal of the past 



— 8 — 

and the Superman of the future. What have you 
done to push beyond incomplete man toward the 
Superman? 

The waiting crowd is not much impressed. 
Zarathustra tries to shame them out of their low 
satisfaction by describing what will happen if 
they refuse to move forward. The earth will no 
longer produce great men. Only the degenerate 
man will remain, the last of his race, the petty 
man who lives in a petty way upon a petty earth. 
He is unable to see anything great in life. He 
blinks his stupid eyes and asks sleepily, "What 
is love, or creation, or aspiration, or a star? 
This degenerate man finds it difficult either to 
rule or to obey. He can neither select and fol- 
low a heroe nor be a heroe himself. It is a world 
in which there is no shepherd, but only sheep. 
"Everybody longs for equality; everybody is 
equal", just because he longs for it. "Whoever 
doubts this will of his own accord go to the home 
for the feeble-minded". The crowd is not at 
all dismayed by this picture of a democratic world 
without ambition, strong personality, or heroes. 
The people shout in scorn: "Give us this last of 
all men, and you can have the Superman all to 
yourself. The circus performers appear, the 
dancing on the tight-rope begins, and they turn 
from the prophet to something of real importance. 
Zarathustra goes back to his lonely mountain 
home. 

We have here the heart of Nietzsche's teaching. 
He has an immense contempt for the crowd, for 
the philosophy, the religion, the democracy, the 
socialism of the crowd, not so much because it is 
the crowd, as because it likes to be the crowd. 
So Nietzsche offers a criticism different from that 



— 9 — 

which we usually hear. Modern social criticism is 
generally presented for the purpose of reforming 
the crowd. We wish men to change and improve 
the common life. Nietzsche, however, wishes us 
to break with the crowd, to leave it behind for 
something better. Just as Ibsen concludes at the 
end of his play, "An Enemy of Society**, that 
"the strongest man is he who stands most alone", 
so Nietzsche declares that greatness exists only 
apart from the market-place and from the praise 
of men. Because the crowd loves the inaction of 
peace, Nietzsche praises the life of adventure, of 
struggle, of the "Will to Power'*, and even puts 
in a good word for war. Because the crowd uses 
the modern democratic state to praise its own 
common-place self, Nietzsche denounces the state. 
"Where the state ceases to be, there the first real 
man begins". 

Evolution, to the average man, means simply 
the struggle for existence, not the struggle for great- 
ness. So the average man thinks it may be pos- 
sible to remove the struggle and leave only the 
existence. But Nietzsche does not believe that the 
life force within man can be satisfied merely to 
exist, merely to keep itself weakly alive. Evolu- 
tion means to him a desire for self-expression, a 
strong, active, "Will to Power**. This impulse to 
power values courage above mere existence. It is 
an instinct for rank, for an aristocracy of power. 
It insists that egotism belongs of right to man. 
"The noble soul has reverence for itself**. The 
tall tree on the mountain side grows at last so 
high above both animals and men that if it 
wished to speak, nobody would understand it. 
When a noble youth, ambitious to create new vir- 
tues, meets Zarathustra on the mountain side, and 



— 10 — 

confesses that he often feels sad and lonely in his 
search for truth, Zarathustra replies that youth 
loses all that is best in life if it turns weakly back, 
and urges him "not to cast away the heroe in his 
own soul". Because "Thus Spake Zarathustra" 
sets forth in this uncompromising way the right of 
the individual to be himself, and defends his will 
to power, it has been called "The Bible for Dis- 
tinguished Men". 

There is much in Nietzsche's glorification of the 
Superman that reminds us of Carlyle and his wor- 
ship of the heroe. But the sense of social respon- 
sibility is greater in Carlyle's heroe than in the 
Superman. There is also much in Nietzsche that 
recalls Emerson's gospel of self-reliance, the right 
to be a non-conformist, the duty of keeping ever 
afloat on the sea of life. But Emerson's self- 
reliant man is also a social man, able to show 
more patience and self-control in the presence of 
the slow moving crowd than the easily irritated 
Superman. Emerson sets before us both a higher 
and a more difficult ideal when he writes; "It is 
easy in the world to live after the world's opin- 
ion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; 
but the great man is he who in the midst of the 
crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the inde- 
pendence of solitude". Yet, even after we recog- 
nize the defects in Nietzsche's teaching, it con- 
tinues to keep its irritating grip upon us. For we 
cannot deny that we are face to face with the real 
danger that marked individuality, and free per- 
sonality, and distinguished careers will be choked 
by the modern crowd. 

There is the problem of universal education, 
with state universities open to all. Is there not 
always danger lest the lower schools, carrying 



— 11 — 

more votes, set the standard for the higher, that 
the universities may go down and cater to the 
people, instead of the people coming up to the 
universities? What we gain in extent and quan- 
tity of education we may lose in quality. There 
is the amazing spread of amusements. A work- 
ingman in a large city recently expressed his dis- 
may at the changes taking place. "A few years 
ago**, he said, "a man staid at home evenings, 
and only dressed himself in his best clothes on 
Sunday. Now he puts on his Sunday clothes 
every night, goes out on the streets, and wanders 
aimlessly from one moving picture show to ano- 
ther**. Do more theatres also mean better thea- 
tres? Or take democracy; are we certain where 
it is leading us? It is pointed out that we have 
few great men in public life, few men of strong 
vigorous character in congress. Is this because 
there are no strong men left in our democratic 
world, because the crowd has swallowed them 
up, or is it because strong men will not submit to 
the whims of the crowd? Does not a democracy 
deserve Nietzsche's bitter words in which re- 
sponsible leadership is unappreciated, in which 
the politician, playing to the galleries, is preferred 
to the statesman planning on long lines, in which 
the demagogue is often eagerly listened to, while 
the trained, scientific expert goes unheard? Per- 
haps it is this widespread distrust of leadership 
that has caused so many American men of 
marked executive ability to turn to business, 
where the "Will to Power** has so far been free 
to exercise control. But now the crowd asks, in 
the name of socialism, that it be allowed to run 
both politics and business. Will this mean in- 
creased or decreased social wealth? If the slow- 



— 12 — 

est worker, the man who lays the fewest bricks, 
or drives the fewest nails, is to be allowed to set 
the pace for all work in the coming industrial 
state, then the age of Zarathustra's "last man", 
with no force of charracter, no energy of ambi- 
tion, with no power to love or to work in a strong 
way is upon us, and mankind is ready to retrace 
its steps toward the apes. 

If it were not for these political and industrial 
questions, Nietzsche's violent attack on modern 
society might pass unnoticed. But the presence 
of so many unsolved problems makes it impos- 
sible to refute Nietzsche by words alone. The 
only convincing answer to his pessimism will be 
actual social progress in the direction of the 
free, just, and ideal social life. Such progress 
will require the pioneer, the self-reliant, inde- 
pendent, forward-pushing man; otherwise all men 
will contendly remain mired in the past. Such 
progress will also need the man of vision, who 
from the lonely mountain top spies out the pro- 
mised land. But it will also require a sense of 
responsibility for the crowd, a willingness to ex- 
plain the path of progress in plain and simple 
language, and a patience to wait for the slow and 
faint-hearted, such as Nietzsche's Superman does 
not possess. 

If the Superman is he who dares to push ahead 
of the crowd into a new country, perhaps the 
Super-Superman will be he w T ho dares turn from 
solitary visions of truth to become as one who 
serves his fellow men, who is not only wise 
enough to point out the difficult problems that 
confront democracy, but also strong enough to 
face these problems day after day, and to wrestle 
mightily with them for the common good. 



THE WEAKNESS OF PITY. 

In our first address we considered Nietzsche's 
stimulating message to the individual. The prob- 
lem he sets before him is, "what type of man 
must be reared, must be willed, as having the 
highest value, as being the most worthy of lifev 
and the surest guarantee of the future'. Evolu- 
tion means something more than a struggle for 
mere average existence. It is a "Will to Power", 
which would push beyond present man. The life 
force strives to produce the heroe whom Carlyle 
would have us worship. The energy within calls 
for the free and self-reliant man, who dares to 
trust primitive, unreasoned impulse, of whom 
Emerson wrote: 

"Freedom's secret wilt thou know? 
Counsel not with flesh and blood; 
Loiter not for cloak or food; 
Straight thou feelest, rush to do." 

It is evident that a strongly centralized state, 
or a domineering military caste, or a Prussian 
attempt to force the same culture upon all the 
people through control of the schools, does not 
encourage independent character. So we are not 
surprised to find that Nietzsche was a most bitter 
critic of Germany, and that he always preferred 
French culture and freedom. 



— 14 — 

We also noticed certain temptations that stand 
in the way of every man who desires to push 
forward. Just as in the old Greek poem, The 
Odyssey, the sirens try to lure Ulysses and his 
sailors on the rocks, and so put an end to their 
adventuresome voyage, so certain modern sirens 
tempt the modern traveller to give up his journey 
toward the Superman and to cast anchor in the 
harbor of the common-place. Only while the 
ancient sirens were generally recognized as de- 
signing females, of none too good a reputation, 
the modern sirens occupy quite respectable po- 
sitions, and bear honored names. Philosophy and 
religion, democracy and art, may all at times act 
the part of false friends. They urge the traveller 
to be content with truth already found, with 
average standards of life, with soft doctrines of 
salvation, and to forget the call to strenuous life. 

The most dangerous temptress of all now 
meets us. She is called Pity, and does more than 
all the others to make man weak and inefficient. 
Here, more than elsewhere, Nietzsche justifies his 
claim that he takes a wholly different view of 
duty from that held by the mass of men, and 
turns morality upside down. Pity, which the 
world regards as a virtue, he calls a vice. Pity, 
which most men think a sign of spiritual growth, 
he brands as spiritual decadence. Pity, which 
religion seems to regard as a duty, he holds is the 
last and most dangerous sin for man to over- 
come. For pity makes love unavailing, and as 
a rule fails to help even those whom it pities. As 
a flaw in a steel beam weakens its strength, or as 
a knot in a timber reduces its power to support 
heavy weights, so pity spoils everything it touches. 

Many persons are so shocked at this extreme 



— 15 — 

view that they will not stop to consider just what 
it means. They regard Nietzsche as a moral mon- 
ster, as being himself the chief of all sinners. 
They decline to take any medicine unless it is 
sugar coated. But when Nietzsche's statements 
about the weakness of pity are grouped together 
and carefully examined they ido not seem very 
shocking, at least to those who have been trained 
to face radical truth. ^n*»^|; 

Nietzsche does not mean by pity what we 
usually mean. In English we say that we have 
pity for a person, by which we commonly mean 
only that we recognize his condition as unfor- 
tunate. But Nietzsche uses the word, "Mitleid '„ 
which means that we have pity with a person, 
that we suffer with him, and so add our sorrow 
to his sorrow. Nietzsche makes it clear that he 
uses pity with this stronger meaning. He defines 
sympathy as "fellow-suffering". When we thus 
suffer with another person we only add to the 
general stock of weepiness, and our tears often 
blind us to our practical duty. So Nietzsche says 
that; "pity is a waste of feeling, a moral parasite 
which is injurious to health; it cannot possibly be 
our duty to increase the evil in the world". He 
asks whether, if all the woe of the world could be 
viewed from some height, it should be allowed to 
arouse so much sympathy in the spectator as to- 
double the amount of the world's woe; and he 
concludes that this would be an evil. This is not 
the teaching of a hard-hearted man but of one 
who had himself felt the depressing effect of pity 
upon useful action and had himself been obliged 
~^to wage a fight against it. Nietzsche's sister says 
of his experience as a nurse in war time; — "What 
the sympathetic heart of rny brother suffered at 



— 16 — 

that time cannot be expressed; months after he 
still heard the groans and the agonized cries of 
the wounded. During the first year it was prac- 
tically impossible for him to speak of these 
things'*. 

Let us see for ourselves how an excess of pity, 
how suffering with others is likely to weaken 
power to do good. Here is a boy. He climbs a 
tree in the back-yard, falls out of it and breaks 
a leg. Here is a sympathetic mother, who is so 
overcome with sorrow for her boy that when she 
looks out of the window and sees him fall she 
promptly faints away. What use is a fainting 
mother to a boy with a broken leg? Here is a 
hospital filled with sickness and pain. Suppose 
the nurses, instead of living bravely and conscien- 
tiously above the level of the hospital pain, 
should suffer with the patients. Suppose that they 
should duplicate every groan, shudder with every 
agony, tremble with every fear of death. Would 
anybody ever get well in such a dismal and sym- 
pathetic hospital? At the operating table stands 
the surgeon. Suppose he allows his thoughts to 
concentrate on the suffering of the patient instead 
of on the way to relieve the patient. What use 
would a weeping surgeon be to a sick world? 

When students at college are asked what kind 
of religion they like they reply; — "No sob stuff". 
They instinctively feel that mere weeping is not 
socially efficient, that it is better to face the world 
with courage than with tears, that carefully 
worked out plans for making the world better are 
of more value than irrational appeals to unre- 
strained emotion. 

t ..The chief reason why Jesus is a greater reli- 
gious leader than Buddha is that he appealed to 



— 17 — 

love rather than to pity. When Buddha felt so 
sorry for the sick man, the old man, the dead 
man, he met when driving one day in his park, 
then he concluded that life contained only evil, 
and he sought in passive meditation a way of 
escape. When Schopenhauer, the celebrated phil- 
osopher of pessimism, made pity the corner stone 
of his morality, then the woes of life loomed so 
vast and threatening that he also lost courage and 
the desire to live. That is the reason why Nietz- 
sche writes; — "Alas for love which does not pass 
beyond pity". That is why he puts love above 
pity, because love does not despair, but has a 
creative power which would help and make over 
those whom it loves. That is why he says; "Not 
your pity, but your bravery has hitherto saved the 
unhappy". 

So far we may in general agree with Nietzsche 
that pity with a person, feeling his suffering as 
keenly as he feels it himself, tends to lessen, or 
even to destroy our power to help that person. 
To put love above pity, courage above tears, and 
to control weepiness for the sake of efficiency, is 
not a vice but a virtue. Now we come to a phase 
of the subject that is more difficult. We pass 
from the question of helpfulness to the individual 
to the larger question of helpfulness to society. 
We may agree that we ought not allow pity to 
weaken our ability to aid the suffering individual; 
but how about suffering society? Do we also 
agree that we ought not to allow pity to interfere 
when for the sake of society we need, not simply 
to aid, but sternly to control and discipline the 
individual? 

An illustration from the higher education may 
rciake the matter clear. Such an institution as a 



— 18 — 

state university, which stands so close to the 
people, is constantly forced to choose between dis- 
cipline and pity. Anxious parents and guardians 
are all the time coming up to the universities to 
intercede for students who fall below the stand- 
ards, and are about to be invited to move to a 
milder intellectual climate. Such parents do not 
appeal to justice, to the fair-mindedness of the 
professors. They try to make the governing 
authorities feel the parental woes so keenly that 
they shall forget, just this once, to enforce educa- 
tional standards, forget what a university is for, 
confuse it with a hospital for the feeble minded 
or the morally weak. Of course, somewhere in 
-our educational system, the right kind of training 
ought to be provided for those who cannot ad- 
vance far along the intellectual road; but the uni- 
versity is not the place for this. The university 
exists more for the strong than for the weak. 
It is not a first aid to the mentally wounded, 
but a training camp for the development of in- 
tellectual strength. Its chief business is, or ought 
to be, with an intellectual aristocracy, not with the 
common-place average" mental life. To give more 
attention to the weak than to the strong, to spend 
more time on those who fail in examinations than 
on those who succeed, would take away all 
power, all leadership, almost all social usefulness 
from a university. A standard based on pity in- 
stead of on discipline, based on softness instead 
of on stimulating hardness, would be a vice in- 
stead of a virtue. As far as our higher educa- 
tional institutions go we deny that men are crea- 
ted intellectually equal, and we deny that they 
have equal intellectual rights. 

The illustration of the university is used be- 



— 19 — 

cause it brings us to the point where we either 
part company with Nietzsche or continue to profit 
by his stimulating tho often violent thoughts. 
Dare we say the same thing of that larger social 
unit, the social world, that we say of the smaller 
social unit, the college? Is the social world pri- 
marily for the weak or for the strong? It is to 
be organized chiefly as a hospital for the sick, or 
as a training ground for the healthy minded? 
Ought unequal men be given equal freedom, 
rights, power, or should the lines be more sharply 
drawn? Is pity the virtue most needed today in 
our disorganized world, or is stern, disciplined, 
social efficiency most needed? 

Nietzsche holds that the world is primarily for 
the strong, that evolution is a "Will to Power* \ 
not a struggle just to keep aimlessly alive. "The 
first principle of our humanity is that the weak 
and botched shall perish". This is strong lan- 
guage, but it does not mean the brutal slaughter 
of the unfit. It does not require, as some care- 
lessly suppose, that strong individuals should cut 
the throats of the weak, or that the strong state 
should lock up in prison all who disagree with it, 
or that a strong religion should return to the 
early practice of burning heretics at the stake. 
Nietzsche refuses to say that a world in which all 
the influence of the weak was lacking would be 
a desirable world. Illness seems to him a valuable 
discipline, which gives time to think, and to re- 
arrange one's plan of life. "Never have I rejoiced 
more over my condition than during the sickest 
and most painful moments of my life". But he 
does hold that, as society is now organized, we 
give too much encouragement to weakness and 
too little to strength. He does deny that con- 



— 20 — 

stitutional weakness has any right to propagate 
itself. He woul not choke off weak individuals; 
but he would choke off the permanently weak 
types. 

Nietzsche, therefore, makes a strong plea for 
eugenics. It is not true that men are created 
physically, mentally, morally equal, as the cheap 
politician assures the crowd on the Fourth of July. 
Modern study of cases of degeneracy shows this. 
It is not true that men have equal social rights. 
No man has the right to freedom when he is suf- 
fering from typhoid, scarlet-fever, or small-pox. 
So no man has a right to propagate a degenerate 
or a criminal type. "Society, as the trustee of 
life, is responsible for every botched life before 
it ever comes into existence, and, as it has to 
atone for such lives, it ought consequently to 
make it impossible for them ever to see the light 
of day". "There are cases where to have a child 
would be a crime, for example, in the case of 
chronic invalids, and extreme neurasthenics". 
Nietzsche's views are in agreement with the Wis- 
consin law when he insists upon "a medical cer- 
tificate as a condition of any marriage". Real 
marriage, he believes, "is the desire of two to 
create that which is more than themselves". So 
he would ask the young man who would marry, 
"are you a man who dares to have a child?" 

Here we too often let weak sentiment and pity 
take the place of justice to society. We read in 
the Old Testament; "I, the Lord, thy God am 
a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon 
the children, and upon the third and fourth gene- 
ration". We think this could only be true in 
primitive and hard-hearted days. We are so sorry 
for the weak, the degenerate, the criminal, that 



— 21 — 

we allow them to breed freely, allow them to pass 
their weakness on to the third and to the fourth 
generation. With our alms-houses, and infant 
asylums, and short-term reformatories, we make 
it easier for weak-minded women to go on pro- 
ducing weak-minded children year after year. 
We are just beginning to make it easier for strong 
women to produce and bring up strong children 
in a strong way. In the face of such conditions 
how can we be content to denounce Nietzsche's 
teaching as being simply monstrous, how can we 
rightly decline to take a dose of the bitter medi- 
cine we so much need? 

In the case of the individual we may agree with 
Nietzsche; — "Not your pity but your bravery has 
hitherto saved the unhappy". We should lay aside 
that sympathy Emerson calls "base*, and of which 
he writes; — "We come to them who weep fool- 
ishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead 
of imparting to them truth and health in rough 
electric shocks' \ We need to weep less over men 
and help them more. 

"Alas for the love that does not pass beyond 
pity". For pity always has a tendency to pessi- 
mism, and so a tendency to weakness, inaction, 
inefficiency. Love always has a tendency to op- 
timism; it believes in and works for the good in 
the object of its affection. We ought to pay less 
attention to the pity of Buddha and more atten- 
tion to the love that was in Jesus. We ought to 
pity a man less for his many failures, and love him 
more for his undeveloped good. 

In the case of society, we should not allow suf- 
fering with others, weak pity for their condition, 
to stand in the way of our applying stern dis- 
cipline and strict justice when the welfare of so- 



— 22 — 

ciety clearly demands it. We ought to insist that 
degenerate men and women should not be 
allowed to propagate their kind. We ought to 
insist that degenerate books, and pictures, and 
amusements, should not be allowed to propagate 
their kind. We ought to insist that degenerate 
ideas of labor, three soft hours of work a day 
and a large income for every lazy person, should 
not be allowed to undermine society. We ought 
to insist that weak standards of discipline in the 
home and in the schools should be driven out. 
We ought to insist that religion should be some- 
thing more than a mush of sentiment, a soft sal- 
vation for soft sins, that it should encourage and 
build up strong and positive types of life. 

If we wish to help the world out of its present 
trouble we should turn from pessimism to opti- 
mism, from softness to strength. We should 
cease to pity others so much, and to pity our- 
selves so much, that at last it seems a pity that 
any one of us is still alive. "Man has been only 
an attempt. There are a thousand paths which 
have never been trodden'*. We should brace up, 
acquit ourselves like men, bring discipline and 
courage again into life, and /alone or together, 
push on into new paths, which lead at first to 
strong individual character, and may lead at last 
to the strong heroic state. 



CHRISTIANITY AS A DENIAL 
OF LIFE. 

There is a kind of revolt against conven- 
tional customs and ideas that always runs into 
license. In art it stands for cubist splashes of color 
without troubling itself about correct drawing. In 
music it produces a riot of sounds apart from dis- 
ciplined form. In social life it shows itself as 
pleasure divorced from restraint, as sex uncon- 
trolled by social responsibility. Whatever may be 
the faults of Nietzsche he does not preach such a 
gospel of soft relaxation. "Life gets harder 
toward the summit, the cold increases, responsi- 
bility increases ". For the individual, responsibili- 
ty is the choice man is called upon to make be- 
tween the standards of the crowd and the vision 
of the Superman, between soft indolent conform^ 
ity and the heroic in his own soul. For society this 
responsibility means organization for the strong 
more than for the weak, for the healthy more 
than for the sick, for the good of future men and 
women more than for the selfish desires of the 
present. 

We can only understand Nietzsche's criticism 
of Christianity when we keep in mind the fact 
that he approaches Christianity from the point of 
view of this conflict of two ideals. On the one 
hand we have the ideal of higher types of men, 
of the Superman; on the other hand we have the 
levelling down tendency of democracy. On the 
one side we have the belief that society should 



— 24 — 

organize to perpetuate strong social types; and 
on the other side we have the demagogue shout- 
ing, as in Ibsen's play, that one man is as good as 
another, that a common barn-yard fowl is just as 
good as the most cultivated Spanish hen, that the 
lowest mongrel is the equal of the best bred dog. 

Where does the Christianity of dogma, of theo- 
logy, of formal religion stand? Is it for the 
crowd or for the Superman? Does it say "Yea" 
or does it say "Nay" to the strong evolutionary 
impulse to higher, purer, better bred types of life? 
Must we describe the usual church in Lowell* s 
words as "a hospital for superannuate forms and 
mumping shams", as "a parlor where men issue 
policies of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind", 
as "but an ambulance to fetch life's wounded and 
malingerers in, scorned by the strong"; or is it 
an aid, an inspiration to strong men, and to a 
strongly builded future social state? No doubt 
the churches contain both the denial of life and 
the assertion of life in their differing dogmas; but 
on which side has been and now is the eccle- 
siastical emphasis? 

Before we quote some of Nietzsche's words 
about dogmatic Christianity, it is important to 
note that Nietzsche, like most modern investiga- 
tors, draws a sharp line between the Christian re- 
ligion and its founder. Probably the line is too 
sharply drawn. "The Christians", he writes, 
"have never led the life which Jesus commanded 
them to live". That close corporation, the 
church, "is precisely that which the messenger of 
glad tidings regarded as beneath him, as behind 
him". To be really Christian" would mean abso- 
lute indifference to dogmas, priests, church, and 
theology". 



— 25 — 

We remember that Jesus did seem to reject 
church rules about fasting, ceremonial washings, 
long prayers, rigid Sabbath observance, and 
sharply condemned the hard, formal religion of 
the Pharisees. We agree with Nietzsche that 
the original gospel was "a method of life, not a 
system of belief. Whether desirable today or 
not. Nietzsche thinks this original gospel would at 
least be possible. "He who says, 'I refuse to be 
a soldier, I care not for tribunals, I lay no claim 
to the services of the police, I will do nothing 
that disturbs the peace within me, and, if I must 
suffer on that account, nothing can so well main- 
tain my inward peace as suffering*, such a man 
would be a Christian". Nietzsche pays his tribute 
to Jesus for his power to live this independent 
life, above the crowd, above resentment for their 
stupidity, above fear of death. In this inner 
"blessedness" he finds the reality of the original 
gospel. He writes of the crucifixion; — "When the 
criminal' \ the thief crucified along with Jesus, 
"declares; — 'The way this Jesus suffers and dies, 
without murmer of revolt or enmity, graciously 
and resignedly, is the only right way', he assents 
to the gospel; and by this very fact is in Para- 
dise". 

Whatever measure of approval Nietzsche may 
give to Jesus for his independent life above re- 
sentment and fear, such approval does not extend 
to the narrow religion afterward built around his 
name. Nietzsche insists that there "never was 
more than one Christian, and he died on the 
cross"; also his "gospel died on the cross". The 
"glad tidings" of Jesus were closely followed by 
the "worse tidings" of the Apostle Paul. In him 
theology replaced the original gospel, and the 



— 26 — 

priest "again aspired to power". With the ex- 
tension of Christianity over ever larger and rud- 
er mases of men it began to play to the gallery, 
to appeal to the mob, to become vulgar and com- 
mon-place. The dogmatic and priestly type of 
religion which was at last built up, Nietzsche re- 
gards as a "capital crime against life". 

Church Christianity stands for "the profanation 
of the divine nature of man, instead of its accent- 
uation". It could not endure "the evangelical 
right and truth of every man to be the child of 
God, which Jesus taught." So it "lowered the 
concept, man; its ultimate conclusion is that all 
goodness, greatness, and truth are superhuman, 
and are obtainable by the grace of God". Then, 
just as some huge corporation today tries to cor- 
ner the coal, or grain, or oil market, the one true 
church, as it calls itself, tries to corner this "grace 
of God' . To get saving truth man has to apply 
to Protestant synod or to Roman pope. To get 
saving goodness he has to rely on church baptism, 
or priestly absolution, or the magic of the mass. 
To get into heaven he has to be approved and 
tagged by some church. Original sin and repent- 
ance through the church are dogmas formulated 
to fasten on man the rule of the priest. 

Because this theology distrusts life, it also dis- 
trusts those brave and unusual men who would 
reform, educate, advance present life. History 
shows how official religion "has despatched all 
great men to hell", all strong reformers, inde- 
pendent thinkers, discoverers of new truth. In- 
stead of standing for progress within this world, 
it believes only in progress to another world. It 
is thus a "taming process", which makes men 
more fit to live in a cage under the control of a 



— 27 — 

priestly keeper, than to live out in the rough and 
tumble of real life. Christian pessimism and 
alcohol Nietzsche regards as "the two great means 
of corruption", as the two powerful narcotics that 
slow down man and decrease social efficiency. 
"We no longer admire those dentists who extract 
teeth simply in order that they may not ache 
again". So he refuses longer to admire any ethi- 
cal or religious teaching that merely desires to up- 
root life, or any part of life, its strong passions, 
its forward pushing instincts, its will to power, 
simply because it does not know what to do with 
life when it aches, does not know how to impose 
"some sort of moderation" upon its passions, and 
so use them to build up resourcefulness, efficien- 
cy, and strength. 

Nietzsche in his violent way says many extreme 
things about the ecclesiastical forms of Christiani- 
ty; but he also says much that is true. We may 
see how the church has tried to limit life, rather 
than to encourage life, if we restate the matter in 
our own words. 

Suppose we get up a slogan for all those who 
wish to make the best out of present life. Here 
it is; — "Believe in Life and Be Boosters". This 
means that truth within this present world is 
worth seeking. Character within this present life 
is worth building. It is good to study in the hard 
school of experience and to learn all we can to 
the very end. It is good to get into the game and 
play it for all we are worth. Do such statements 
seem to contain wrong and vicious ideals? The 
question seems absurd. But, let us go a step far- 
ther, let us ask which one of these active, positive, 
life-encouraging ideals, theological and church 
Christianity has ever heartily approved? Which 



— 28 — 

one of them gets enthusiastic and whole-hearted 
approval of Roman pope, of Protestant council, 
of early Christian theologians, or even of the wri- 
ters of the New Testament epistles? 

Let us, with Nietzsche, avoid speculative ques- 
tions about how far the stock Christian dogmas 
are historically or philosophically true. That is, 
let us pass over theories about Adam and original 
sin, about atonement through the blood of the 
lamb, about a supernatural heaven and hell. Let 
us ask the modern practical pragmatic question; 
— How far are the old, stock dogmas of the chur- 
ches morally or socially useful? 

Here is a man who is making a brave fight for 
self-control. He wishes to live near the summit, 
where life gets harder, and personal responsibility 
increases. Will it help to tell him, in the name of 
the one true church, that in Adam all men have 
sinned, and that it is hopeless for natural man to 
try and live a life pleasing to the good? Here is 
a man who feels that all parts of life are of worth, 
have some eternal meaning hidden in them. He 
wishes to feel "eternal life*' within himself, to feel 
"the kingdom** within himself, to feel "blessed- 
ness** within himself. He would try to reach in 
himself the freedom and peace of the pure original 
gospel of Jesus. Does human life seem of more 
worth to him when some priest teaches that the 
only way to reach blessedness and God is to leave 
the world, kneel before the altar, and eat the real 
body and the real blood of a sacrificed deity in 
the magic ritual of the mass? Here is a man who 
takes his own life very seriously, and feels re- 
sponsible for his own acts. Does it deepen his 
character to teach him that Christ, by his death 
on the cross, bears his sins for him, and that he 



_ 29 — 

should throw all responsibility upon a super- 
natural saviour? Ibsen in his bitter couplet ex- 
pressed the true man's opinion of the weakening 
effect of such a theology upon morality. 

"One man died for you of yore, 
Cowardice is crime no more." 

Here are a young man and woman united in a 
bond of matrimony which to them is pure and 
holy. Is their belief in the sacredness of matri- 
mony strengthened when they take their first child 
to be baptized and hear the clergyman declare 
that the child is "conceived in sin'*, and can only 
be made "regenerate'* by the magic sprinkling of 
baptismal water? How can self-respecting parents 
permit a clegyman thus to insult them? Or is 
married life made more sacred when the churches 
continue even today to teach that when God 
wished to visit the earth he had to be born of a 
pure virgin in order to escape the aweful contami- 
nation of sex? 

Here is the modern scientist seeking eternal 
laws in nature, feeling after the beauty and won- 
der of life in laboratory and field. The way such 
scientist has been treated in the past is plain to 
anybody who reads the two interesting volumes 
on "The Warfare of Science and Theology" by 
Andrew D. White. There has been scarcely any 
important discovery in geology, in astronomy, in 
biology, in medicine, that has not been bitterly 
opposed by that kind of organized religion that 
ties itself down to a fixed creed. Science is more 
appreciated today; but have the great ethical 
ideals of modern science ever been incorporated 
into the official teachings of the usual type of 
church? Prof. Quick gives these ideals as, "cu- 



— 30 — 

riosity, candour, care". Prof. James gives them 
as, "precision, honesty, fact". How many old 
church dogmas would be left unchanged if such 
ethical ideals were honestly applied to them? 

Here are thousands of earnest men and women 
who give up their lives to the great cause of social 
work and social progress. They dream of estab- 
lishing on this earth an ideal Commonwealth of 
Man which shall reflect the old religious ideal of 
the Kingdom of Heaven. Who can believe that 
such work would not be heartily approved by the 
great founder of the gospel religion? But who can 
say that such work has ever received adequate 
official approval by those who came after him? 
Can social reform work be encouraged by quot- 
ing the later New Testament writers; — "Love not 
the world, neither the things that are in the world. 
If any man love the world, the love of the Father 
is not in him". Or is social work dignified when 
a leading denomination today declares that 
Church Unity should mean the acceptance by all 
of the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, which creeds 
contain not a single word about love to man, or 
social duty, or the need of making this present 
life better? 

It is an encouraging sign that at last some of 
the churches ate working to broaden their ethical 
ideals to include present social duties, and are try- 
ing to make religion more socially efficient. Yet 
it is still true of the vast majority of the churches 
that they say "Nay" rather than "Yea" to life. 
Any one of us could bring together from the high- 
est ideals of science, as the modern seeker after 
truth, and from the highest ideals of social service 
work, as the modern seeker after righteousness, 
a more useful and more efficient code of social 



— - 31 — 

ethics than could be gathered from all the ortho- 
dox creeds formulated by Christian theologians 
since the Christian world began? 

It is a furious attack that Nietzsche makes on 
formal, dogmatic, church Christianity; and fury 
over-reaches itself. Nietzsche is another painful 
example of what a narrow and orthodox church 
training during childhood may later do to a man's 
faith. It often violently drives a man from one 
extreme to another. Nietzsche, in his reaction 
from dogmatic Christianity, is like a man who 
says, because there are many wrong things about 
the law, therefore all law is wrong. Or he is like 
a man who says, because much time is wasted in 
our schools, therefore all schools are a waste of 
time. But while Nietzsche's teaching may be 
easily attacked at many points, chiefly in that it 
overlooks the good and speaks only of the de- 
fects of the church religion, it is better to learn 
what we can from him, instead of merely wasting 
our time by getting angry. If the tonic can do us 
any good, it is foolish to complain that it has a 
bitter and unchristian taste. 

The work which the tonic may do for us, the 
kind of mental and moral strength it may give, 
seems fairly clear. Both Democracy and Reli- 
gion tend to become one-sided, and need to be 
taught to stand straight. If, on the one hand, 
Democracy needs to rise above the common- 
place, and "hitch its wagon to a star'*; Religion, 
on the other hand, needs to spend less time 
in star gazing, and more time in encouraging 
practical social work. If Democracy needs to 
think less of its common-place, average self, and 
more of the Superman that is to be; Religion 
needs to think less of the Supernatural and more 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



ilium,, 



32 - 



029 315 960 



of every-day life and duty. Where Democracy 
needs to be exalted, to push its ideals above the 
crowd level; Religion needs to pay less attention 
to a far-away theological heaven, and to learn to 
be of more service to man here and now. 

In conclusion we may quote one of Nietzsche's 
better and more attractive sentences. "From 
people who merely pray we must become people 
who bless". Perhaps a world in which it is pos- 
sible for people to bless, may turn out to be a 
blessed world. Perhaps a life, in which all ought 
to believe, to which all ought to say "Yea", may 
turn out to be a blessed life. Perhaps a church, 
which would put aside the desire for dominion 
and power, and live only to serve and to bless 
men, would be a blessed church. Perhaps the 
Superman, who lives above the standards of the 
crowd, lives above resentment with those who 
differ from him, lives above fear of death, may 
not live alone at all, but may live with some 
Reality deeper and more lasting and more trust- 
worthy than the shifting crowd, the Foundation 
of all progressive thought and acts, the Source of 
the will to power, and the Promise to man of 
ultimate success. 



t*X@W^ 



Milwaukee Unitarian Church, 

Astor Street and Ogden Avenue. 

Sunday Morning Service at 11. 



\ 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



029 815 960 # 



